A Curious Calling: Equador The Wizard

Who knew magic and stripping went hand in hand?

CUTTING through the predictable attend-Hogwarts, kill-Voldemort, serve-at-the-Ministry-of-Magic wizard life choices, Equador the Wizard has chosen an altogether racier path. Winner of London burlesque Week’s ‘Best UK Male 2009’ and ‘Best Male Performance Artist 2011’, he is presumably battling the Dark Lord of Prudery instead. Who needs a Time-Turner when you can make a rabbit’s tail appear on your naked bottom and a wand between your legs? Anyway, burlesque wizard (and massage therapist) struck me as a curious calling if ever there was one, and so I went to meet Equador to find out how he came to be such a creature. Expecting purple velvet robes and gestures that shed glitter, I was surprised to discover a barefoot man with a ‘peace & love’ T-shirt, in the middle of baking sugar-free banana bread for breakfast.

I used to love getting naked at any opportunity. I’d do the naked bike ride every year in London, Brighton, anywhere. Now, I’m a professional and I get paid to be naked.

Photograph by Petri Haggren

How did you get into magic?I was working on the Noddy train on Bournemouth beach front when I broke my pelvis. They hadn’t given me any safety training and I lost control of it and it crushed me. But there’s always a reason for the reality we create. I needed to show myself where I needed to be in life – not working on the Noddy train. I ended up moving back to London and working at Hamleys. Selling magic. Someone offered me a gig that paid in two hours what I got there in three days. And that was low pay for a magician! So I took it more seriously, quit Hamleys and went pro.

And what’s it got to do with burlesque?Well, in all my jobs I have to be a natural ‘dom’. You can’t be a submissive magician. I’m naturally a dom and I’ve worked very hard not to be a dom all the time. Not to dominate. Being a therapist is about control, a magician controls a crowd and being a stripper is about being sexy on stage and controlling a crowd. So I work very hard in my personal life not to be like that.

You’d end up like Jafar or something...Funnily enough the more outrageous I am on stage – as that very sexual, dominant, masculine character – the more calm and sedate I am offstage. A lot of girls come up to me after the strip show thinking that I’m this dominant, manly man and I’m not. Offstage I’m just a fluffy, old fluff bag really.

So before you did the burlesque show were you much wilder offstage?I used to love getting naked at any opportunity. I’d do the naked bike ride every year in London, Brighton, anywhere. Now, I’m a professional and I get paid to be naked. This year I’d rather go to Wimbourne Folk Festival than cycle naked with a thousand other people.

Why do you like being naked so much?Because I don’t have a problem with it at all. My mum has quite a hippy outlook. When I was younger, me and my sister would come out of school and take our clothes off down to our pants and shoes. The other parents were horrified but my mum was like, “Well, they wanna be naked!” I’d run home in my pants.

What did the other kids think?That we were complete weirdos! I got bullied loads. But I was bullied so much anyway – I was brought up in quite a rough area, went to a rough school. There were lots of council estate kids and I was tall, lanky, had a stutter and loads of money and did ballet.

And you didn’t mind taking your clothes off in front of them?

My earliest ambition was to be a stripper. It’s all I wanted to do.

Do you think that people who don’t do this kind of stuff aren’t exploring their sexuality?Everyone has a certain amount of sexuality that they have to express in certain ways. Some people repress it, some go to orgies and some get spanked. The way I do it is get naked on stage. The more I strip the less pent up horniness I have. It releases that wanton need.

Equador With Trophy

Is it difficult to have a relationship? Doesn’t whoever you’re with get jealous?I generally don’t have long-term relationships with people. But that’s more me than them. I met a girl at a hen party and then later she said she wasn’t comfortable with me being a stripper. She said, “It’s me or the stripping.” And I thought – well that’s an easy choice. We had to break-up. There’s no way I’d give it up for anyone. Hopefully, I’ll be 80 years old and still stripping.

Advice for potential burlesque wizards?Unless you wake up every day and feel completely miserable in your soul and the only thing you can think about is how to perform and your urge is so great that you actually want to die unless you can be on stage – then you’re not gonna make it.